City Line

In the face of the issues caused by congestion and pollution in city centres, sustainable urban distribution presents producers, transport operators, public authorities, researchers, and people living in cities with several challenges. The aim of loading companies, as is the case with transport operators, is to reduce their costs while at the same time maintaining their quality of service, to meet the requirements of their clients.

The City Line project, through an intelligent platform of pooling and the synchronisation of the activities carried out by those involved in urban logistics, aims to provide an innovative solution to such demand. It proposes to combine the flexibility and agility of cyclo-transporter services to the massification of packages of inter-city transporters. This solution is meant to address transport needs in respect of deliveries to private individuals as much as in respect of deliveries to companies and merchants in urban zones. It merges services for the transport of packages in urban zones into one single contact point for companies that wish to optimise their costs and reduce their carbon footprint.

The technologies adopted within the framework of this project depend on the development of intelligent containers and heuristic algorithms that allow for the optimisation of transport, while at the same time minimising transport’s negative effects on the environment. City Line will lead to the creation of 80 jobs in the short term, and the development of a solution capable of replacing 25% of vans in cities [1], placing the Walloon Region at the cutting edge of urban distribution in Europe.